Rushin' to Russia

The brave, dedicated, and really really dumb people defecting to Putin's paradise.

There’s an excellent book called Political Pilgrims, by the late Paul Hollander, about Americans and Western leftists forever searching for a Communist workers’ paradise overseas. Inevitably they flock to the USSR/China/Cuba (and later Venezuela), insist everything is just awesome there, and then quickly insist it wasn’t “real socialism” when the pile of bodies becomes too large to hide.

Most of these “political pilgrims” had their egos badly bruised, but stopped well short of actually pulling up stakes and emigrating to these People’s Democratic Republics. For most of those who did - like the Stalin-era pilgrims who left America for the USSR whose sad tale is recounted in another outstanding book, The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis - things didn’t end well for them.

Fast forward to 2024, and it’s disaffected, lonely people on the other end of the political horseshoe looking for utopia far away from America and drag queen story hour and stuff. Some have chosen Hungary, which despite an authoritarian government remains a relatively free-ish country.¹ But for the real hardcore, there’s only one place worthy of their high moral standards.

The Free Press profiles several American suckers dissidents who’ve gone all the way and moved to Russia, and they insist everything there is completely awesome, and don’t pay any attention to the FSB-looking guy over there who looks like he’s packing.

The American Men Seeking the American Dream—in Russia

It was probably January 2023 when Joseph Rose, a 49-year-old YouTuber from Tallahassee, Florida, realized God had sent him to Moscow.

“I do think it was God leading me to where I needed to be right now,” Rose told me over the phone. He was in his apartment, with recessed lighting and a sauna and an odd pirate theme, outside the center of the Russian capital. “I would say that Russia is becoming a bastion of Christianity and that America is becoming the opposite of this.” 

He added: “I was put in a spot where I could be used.”

He was alluding to his YouTube channel, which had made him something of a celebrity in Russia. “People recognize me on the street all the time.”

When people ask him what it’s like living in Russia, Rose said, “I often say it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.”

Rose resides at the nexus of a growing movement of Americans chasing the American dream. In Russia.

I spoke to twenty American expats, all men, who have moved to Russia over the past four years. They told me they moved to Moscow or St. Petersburg or the wild east—Siberia—because they no longer believed the one person they once thought could save America—Donald Trump—could still save it. America, they felt, was beyond saving now.

[…]

Rose and Ratsch and the other Americans flocking to Russia told me they did so to save their children and their children’s children.

“I wouldn’t seriously consider starting a family in the U.S. today,” Peter Frohwein told me. Frohwein is 62, and he is divorced with no kids. He had been a computer engineer in Atlanta, and in July 2023, he moved to Yalta, in the Crimea. “The U.S. is a political mess,” he went on. “Socially, things are a mess. Spiritually, things are a mess.” 

Now he is living in an 800-square-foot apartment with a gorgeous view of the Black Sea, a two-minute walk from the beach. There is a farmer’s market nearby—they have the best tomatoes and recently butchered pigs, he said—and he can live comfortably on his Social Security. “And 20 percent of the women could be supermodels,” he said. His children, he expected, will speak English, Russian, and Mandarin.

“People are running around in America wondering why we have so many problems with suicide and depression, and they’ll virtue signal and talk about the phones, and it’s this and that, and the reality is children are not allowed to be children,” Joe, a program manager from Texas who moved to Moscow in 2023 with his wife and six (soon to be seven) children, told me. He didn’t want to share his last name for fear of losing clients back home. 

Frohwein is in for a fun time when the Ukrainians take back Crimea.

Of course, if the experience of this Canadian trad-family is any indication, he’ll probably end up in Siberia long before then: